Login at Kodi Home

Gurney · (This post was last modified: 2009-08-20, 19:49 by Gurney.)

Hello all,

I have a wonderful ION set top box running XBMC and playing 1080p like a charm.

I use it as well to play TV streams (using RTSP) from my ISP. And I noticed that, while HD stream play very fine (they are decoded using h264_vdpau), SD streams are (according to XBMC) played using libmpeg2. It results in one of my 4 cores (Atom330) being fully loaded (while the others are not at all) and a lot of dropped frames.

I guess that's the fact I ask XBMC to upscale whenever playing SD content doesn't help my case, but I was wondering if there was anything to do? Either load balancing on several cores or using VDPAU to give an hand to the Atom?

Thanks a lot!
Gurney

theuni · 2009-08-20, 07:20

See here

starting at post 299.

TheUni

**alanwww1** · 2009-08-20, 10:55

i think in new svn-s vdpau is enabled for mpeg2 as well.

As i know only h264 can be decoded in two threads. All other codecs are single threaded.

Try a new svn !

althekiller · 2009-08-20, 17:36

alanwww1 Wrote:i think in new svn-s vdpau is enabled for mpeg2 as well.

No, that was reverted due to breaking ntsc dvd playback.

Quote:As i know only h264 can be decoded in two threads. All other codecs are single threaded.

Yes, that would be the "problem".

davilla · 2009-08-20, 18:15

Install Ubuntu 8.04 and you will not have a problem with processing being assigned to one core.

**alanwww1** · 2009-08-20, 18:56

davilla Wrote:Install Ubuntu 8.04 and you will not have a problem with processing being assigned to one core.

Yes, but only for h264. For mpeg2 it is the same as it is single threaded !

Gurney · 2009-08-20, 19:48

Thanks for the answers guys.

I will just turn off SW upscaling and use my receiver's.

Happy to read that a solution was found for the multicore balancing though !

davilla · 2009-08-20, 21:10

alanwww1 Wrote:Yes, but only for h264. For mpeg2 it is the same as it is single threaded !

Hehe, I don't think you have been paying attention to the > ubuntu 8.04 cpu scheduling problems with the kernel. The 1.6GHz dual core has plenty of CPU for SD mpeg2, if the CPU load is not pushed into one as it does with more recent kernels. Libmpeg2 being single threaded is NOT the problem, as I can almost do 1080i mpeg under an AppleTV and it's only a single core 1GHz pentium-m.

spozen · 2009-08-20, 22:04

What upscaling method are you using?, i have found sinc to be the most CPU intensive upscaling algorithm. But i can't see much differences between it and bicubic. But that might be because of crappy encode.